Heritage

Lori and I made a return visit to the Vancouver Aquarium for a meeting of the Lower Mainland Museum Educators. This group is very inaptly named, since it includes people like us who are environmental educators.

That sounds rather a dull point to make, but it has been part of my personal education since coming to Canada. I primarily saw museums as being about history and I always saw history as being about human actions, events, thoughts, but fundamentally about people. Ok, I can remember a couple of history lessons where they showed us how where people lived was about geography but I'm not sure how deeply that went in.

But in Canada, history includes natural history and that is true not only for the First Nations but also the history of colonisation from Europe. Human action is ordered here by the might of the land.

Well, Lori and I teach about the land. We teach about Canadian heritage. The bog-forest that we teach about has shaped human history and that is an often repeated truth in this country, it's not something that can be ignored.
And so in reality, the group should be called Lower Mainland Heritage Educators.

Today, two educators from a Museum in Malawi were sharing some insights and experience with us. Today I learned how a country's heritage can be overwhelmingly influenced not by human action, nor the landscape, but by two diseases.
The first disease that has become a foe to fight and live with, was malaria. The experience of everyone in the country is shaped by it. The second is HIV/AIDS.

Little money is given to the museums in Malawi and yet they have them and they are regarded as the 'Custodians of Tradition'. And yet, as the two men spoke, it became clear that the traditions of the people were annihilating them. Their traditions allowed for the easy transmission of HIV. So then the museums became educators, they used the knowledge they guarded to show the people how things must change. Adapt or die, simple as that.

And they talked about another kind of heritage, 'Intangible Heritage', the oral traditions, stories, music, customs, that are handed down within a culture, and how do we preserve that, and is it worth preserving? It is this type of heritage that can be used and is used, to change opinion and practice, to educate.

But the truth is, the truth is, there was a mismatch between their ways of sharing information and ours. The two men spoke slowly and had only a handful of pictures on a laptop to illustrate their points. We listened politely, and I did learn the points I have made above, but it was a challenge to not fall asleep in this amazing and warm room at the Aquarium with dolphins swimming around us, separated only by glass.
When questioned, for example about what feedback they had received when they had asked people what they wanted from a museum, they couldn't answer.
One of the speakers said how wonderful Canada is and how terrible the United States is, but this was an awful faux pas. The first and one of the most insightful and sympathetic questioners was a US American.
To make a gaffe like this in a city that lies virtually on the border with the US is to insult most of the people in the room to some extent or another. He had also praised Madonna for adopting a boy from Malawi, seeming to forget that she is a US citizen.

But of course, in spite of this, there was embarrassing gushing at the end, although granted, not too much.
And then we went off once again to see the sharks and starfish, the graceful sea turtles and stingrays, belugas and caymans. And to step back into our own heritage. Because what I forget sometimes, is that British Columbia is British heritage too, just another arm of it.